Quotes by Philosophers - Page 209

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of all things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a sacrifice on their alters.
Ayn Rand
We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?
Friedrich Nietzsche
When a rock transforms into a diamond, lesser stones will not speak of its beauty, but speak of its unpolishedness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Every time a man (myself) gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. Every time, it has always been the great misfortune of wanting to show off which has lessened me in the presence of the truth. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary. I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one’s secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown.
Albert Camus
Perhaps, if I use my reason in good faith, I may suceed in discovering some ray of probability to lighten me in the dark night of nature. And if this faint dawn which I seek does not come to me, I shall be consoled to think that my ignorance is invincible; that knowledge which is forbidden me is assuredly useless to me; and that the great Being will not punish me for having sought a knowledge of him and failed to obtain it.
Voltaire
This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.
Slavoj Žižek
Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.’ Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.
Michel Foucault
As the sun hides behind clouds, success hides behind trouble.
Matshona Dhliwayo
As yet hath his knowledge not learned to smile, and to be without jealously ; as yet hath his gushing passion not become calm in beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.
Susan Sontag
When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.
Criss Jami
In silence you shall face self...and have respect.
T.F. Hodge
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
Aristotle
If thou workest at that which is before thee following right reason seriously vigorously calmly without allowing anything else to distract thee but keeping thy divine part pure as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately if thou holdest to this expecting nothing fearing nothing but satisfied with thy present activity according to Nature and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.
Marcus Aurelius
The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.
Michel Foucault
Envy comes from people’s ignorance of, or lack of belief, in their own gifts.
Jean Vanier
- Losing is all that's left, I say.- Losing is all we've got left to lose, you sayThe impossibility of not telling, I cannot do otherwise, one can only tell otherwise, with always the same need to make sense of what you've lost, the need not to lose this feeling of losing, the need to feel yourself not losing this feeling that you are still losing the irreplaceable.
Hélène Cixous
It is in the best interest of the rich to preserve poverty.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Showing off is more ridiculous in instances where the thing that is being shown off was bought on credit.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament but in the reporters' gallery yonder there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all.
Thomas Carlyle
There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life," said Petrus, "when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.
Muriel Barbery
Men say they know many things;But lo! they have taken wings, —The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows
Henry David Thoreau
Whatever advice you give be short.
Horace
Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Chase your dreams and your nightmares will grow tired of chasing you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.
Bertrand Russell
Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind.
Bertrand Russell
Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
An insincere critic of a sincere person never wins.
Criss Jami
Be first the master of yourself
Baltasar Gracián
Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down.
Simone de Beauvoir
If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.
Confucius
What worries you, masters you.
John Locke
What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.
Erich Fromm
The shores safety keeps many from the oceans treasures.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The most perfect happiness, surely, must arise from the contemplation of the most perfect object.
David Hume
Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Some thoughts always find us young and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Trebuie sa te departezi putin de tine ca sa te poti apropia de ceilalti.
Andrei Pleșu
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice.A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
Ayn Rand
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use with and publicly in all matters.
Immanuel Kant
And what will bow your shoulders downwill be the vicious and worthless company with whom you will fall into this abyss.
Dante Alighieri
In a covenant...among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
Eric Hoffer
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
Alan W. Watts
The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.
Max Horkheimer
Public services are never better performed than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed, and is proportioned to the diligence employed in performing them.
Adam Smith
The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized vilified and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness and every man understands too that it is no proof of greatness.
Elbert Hubbard
The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.
Michel de Montaigne
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Albert Camus
If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics...
Roger Bacon
We are creatures built on a house of cards of language.
Stefan Molyneux
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle
If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.
Mikhail Bakunin
No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.
Maimonides
We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.
Robert Musil
The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.
Criss Jami
A cat may have nine lives, but a wise person has a hundred.
Matshona Dhliwayo